Pod Insights Good Life Project Leading Neuroscientist: How Out-of-Body Experiences Change Us | Marina Weiler, PhD About this episode Can consciousness exist outside the physical body? Neuroscientist Marina Weiler shares fascinating research on out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and their potential to radically shift our perception of reality. Discover the profound psychological impacts of OBEs - from decreased fear of death to increased interconnectedness - and explore whether these experiences provide a scientific glimpse into the non-local nature of consciousness.
You can find Marina at: Website https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/ | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/out-of-body-experiences-marina-weiler-phd
If you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had Anna Yusim https://episodes.fm/647826736/episode/NjQ5ZjA0NDMzNDYxYzgwMDExOWRjY2Y5 on the science of spirituality.
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Transcript 11,282 words · 7 speakers
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0:00 Speaker 00 An out-of-body experience is the subjective feeling that someone has during a period of time, during a window, that they exist without being in their physical bodies. So during that time, they have the awareness that I exist, I'm still here, but I'm not in my physical body anymore. And when I say it's a subjective feeling, I like to emphasize that because as long as the person had the feeling that they existed without being in their physical bodies, you kind of don't need that proof or that evidence anymore. People can experience different things while they have the experience of being out of their bodies.
0:45 Speaker 00 But to me, what really matters is the feeling that they exist without being in the physical body.
0:54 Jonathan Fields? So have you ever had one of those experiences that just rocks you to your core, but it seems like so different, so out of the ordinary, so extraordinary, and maybe hard to believe that you can't even describe it to yourself, let alone to others? The kind that makes you question everything you thought you knew about reality itself. I have had a few of those mind-bending moments in my life. Little glimpses that seem to reveal deeper layers of truth lurking beneath the surface. Experiences that leave you wondering, is there more to this reality than meets the eye? More to our minds and our consciousness than we have been taught? If you have grabbled with those kind of questions, you're going to love today's guest.
1:35 Jonathan Fields? Because Marina Wyler has dedicated her career to rigorously studying extraordinary human experiences that challenge our conventional understanding of the mind-body relationship. Her recent focus is, wait for this, out-of-body experiences, where people report the sensation of existing outside of their physical form. Utterly mystifying, but it turns out there is some powerful science at work here. And Marina is a fantastic guide for us. She would know. She is an assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, where she studies phenomena that transcend our typical understanding of physicality.
2:18 Jonathan Fields? A trained neuroscientist with expertise in neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and basic neuroscience. She has earned prestigious awards and grants for her groundbreaking research exploring consciousness. Her journey took an unexpected turn when she decided to pivot from more traditional neuroscience topics to the fascinating realm of out of body experiences and near death phenomena, trying to figure out what is actually happening here. In this mind expanding conversation, Marina pulls back the curtain on her research into out of body experiences, what they are, what they aren't, how science explains them, how to access them, and what the powerful benefits just might be.
3:01 Jonathan Fields? Imagine being able to exist outside of your physical form, perceiving the world from an entirely new vantage point. It is an idea that shatters our conventional beliefs about the relationship between mind, body, and brain. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
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4:00 Jonathan Fields? Good Life Project is sponsored by Steel. So I am not in the studio today. I'm actually out on the trail in the Rockies at about 6,000 feet above sea level in Boulder. The leaves are exploding with color and it's just stunning out. And yes, I'm wearing my favorite Steel hat. And just last night, I was wearing one of my favorite Steel jackets, which if you know me, Is not unusual. I wear the hat almost every day and my Stio jackets pretty much live on me all fall and winter. There's even a Stio shop back in town practically in my backyard. Here is why I love them. Stio is designed and tested in Jackson Hole at the base of the Tetons by locals who ski and bike and hike and climb and fish there. Pretty much every day. They have been at it since 2011. So they know warmth and they also know style.
4:45 Jonathan Fields? Everything I have from them, it works great. It holds up in every condition and also looks awesome. And their hometown down is 800 filled down, but it feels more like just your favorite hoodie than a puffy. And ski season is almost here, so gear up now the way that the locals do. Go to stio.com/goodlife for 20% off your order. That's S T I O dot com slash good life. Stio.com/goodlife. Stio, designed and tested in Jackson Hole. Good Life Project is supported by Ernesto rugs. So a small confession, our front porch has been the most neglected corner of our homes since we moved in. It's the first thing anyone steps onto and it's been kind of greeting people with a sad, too small mat.
5:26 Jonathan Fields? Ernesto sent me their samples and now they're making us a rug. And the cool thing is for $10, you get five oversized 12 by 12 samples. So you see the colors at real scale in your own space before you even get it. So we lived with all five colors for a few days and cool morning light and golden afternoon light. And we're sure to be ross on the sky, but Caldwell just kind of kept quietly winning. The thing you're certain about isn't always the thing that fits. And because Ernesto rugs are custom size, cut to the ins. The one we ordered is made to our exact six and a half feet by nine feet space, not close enough. Visit ernesto.com and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 toward any rug of your choice.
6:09 Jonathan Fields? That's E R N E S T A dot com. I'm just deeply fascinated by the work that you're doing. But before we even get to the work that you're doing right now, I'm also really fascinated by what seems to be a really interesting sort of shift in direction. You know, neuroscientists working, doing some research NIH, NIA, UCLA, really what seemed to be a focus on Alzheimer and how that shows up in the brain and imaging around that. And now at UVA, it seems like a lot of your shift, your research is focused on extraordinary human experiences, especially like the most recent work that I've been exposed to, outer body experiences. How do you go from that one thing over and make this really giant swing?
6:54 Speaker 00 It's a good question, Jonathan. The thing is, I've always been fascinated by human consciousness and I've always wanted to work with human consciousness. And the question if consciousness or the mind survives bodily death has always been with me ever since I was little. And I also knew I wanted to study neuroscience. I knew I wanted to be a neuroscientist. But at the same time, the more that I studied about the field of consciousness and if it survives bodily death, I kind of learned that it was a little risky to build my career in terms of PhD and postdoc in that field. Because, you know, it's still very contradictory
7:38 Speaker 00 and it's hard to get funding. And then if I, if I build my training career in this consciousness field, maybe it was gonna be maybe a challenge for me to find a job. So I decided to build my career as a neuroscientist in mainstream, doing mainstream research. So that's why I decided, okay, let me study the brain, understand like really what's happening in the brain from the micro aspect. So I did some basic neuroscience, bench work, doing animal models of cognitive aging and brain stimulation, and also doing MRI, so cognitive systems in Alzheimer's disease.
8:22 Speaker 00 Understanding neurodegenerative diseases. So there was like a plan to build my career as a neuroscientist. So then, once I, I would say, got recognized as a trustable neuroscientist, I could switch and do the type of research that I've always wanted to do. But even when I was doing research in Alzheimer's disease during my PhD, I was really fascinated about how the mind of patients would just fade away. So there was always in the back of my mind, you know, I was doing neuroscience in terms of finding MRI biomarkers for their cognitive decline. But I was very interested in understanding what's happening with their minds.
9:05 Speaker 00 Where is it going? What's happening? Why are they just, their mind of their consciousness is like fading away, like a candle that is, you know, slowly blowing away. So I did do a little bit of consciousness research when I was researching Alzheimer's disease in trying to understand, is there any specific brain regions or brain network that is responsible for that fading away of consciousness and time perception that is altered during Alzheimer's disease? So that question was always there. And also, when I did my postdoc at UCLA, working with traumatic brain injury patients, many of the patients were in coma, were like comatose patients.
9:50 Speaker 00 So again, they have what we call disorders of consciousness. And, you know, that question was always at the back of my mind, like, what's, what's happening? Where is their consciousness? Is this really a product of the brain? Maybe in my mind, it wasn't such a huge gap. My work, like my mainstream neuroscience work and what I'm doing right now at DOBS. I mean, yes, studying out of body experience was something completely new to me that I've never done before, joining DOBS.
10:21 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, right? Because you go into a field and it's a hard science-based field. And like you said, I'm always fascinated by the choices that we make, especially earlier in a career. We're kind of like, okay, I know that there's this, there's this big burning question. There's this fascination, this interest in me that I would love to pursue. But I also kind of know that in this particular field, it's going to raise a lot of eyebrows. If just straight out of the gate, I go there. And if I'm getting this right, it was sort of like you made this decision that says, I want to build legitimacy as a, as a, as a real scientist. I want to be recognized, you know, for, you know, on that level first. And then do it long enough so that this question is, is not going away inside of me.
11:02 Jonathan Fields? So that when the time is right and when I decide to shift gears and focus more on these questions around consciousness, that people will take me seriously, that, you know, I will have built up a reputation by then. Is that right?
11:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's correct. And I also have to admit, you were like, that's, you completely captured my idea. That's what I wanted to do. I wanna, I wanna be recognized as a neuroscientist. And then, once I, you know, put out my ideas about consciousness and consciousness surviving brain death, people take me seriously, you know? They recognize that I am a neuroscientist, you know, that I know how to do science. I know how to do the, how to apply the scientific method to ask and answer to my questions. Even nowadays that I'm, you know, I'm completely in the field of consciousness and the mind-bring relationship. If I am gonna read someone else's work, I am gonna look for their credentials first, you know? Because to me, it matters, you know?
12:00 Speaker 00 Who is this person saying this thing, you know? So I, it's something that I still do today. And to me, matters, okay, this person is, you know, very respected in their field. It's like a respected physicist, is a respected neuroscientist, is a respected philosopher. So I think that's what I was trying to do for myself.
12:19 Jonathan Fields? And that makes so much sense. I think a lot of people would nod along and say like, I totally get that path. But it's also interesting because it also involves a certain amount of delayed gratification. Like, you have to have a certain amount of patience. Say, I'm willing to wait sometimes years to get to that place where now I've sort of, quote, earned the right to do more of the work that I really want to do. And I wonder sometimes, we're not patient people as a general rule, and we either race to it too quickly, or we just kind of abandon it over time because we fall into a system where we're like, okay, so, things are kind of going along. I've got prestige and status and maybe like a good salary, and let me just keep on keeping on and forget about those things that deeply fascinated me. And I wonder
13:03 Jonathan Fields? sometimes how many people walk away from that really deep burning question. And I love seeing you go back to yours and say like, no, this matters too much to me. I really want to dive into your research around outer body experiences because it's so fascinating to me. But you said a couple of times now, you make a distinction between consciousness or the mind and the brain. Can we tease that out a little bit?
13:24 Speaker 00 Well, we live in a current paradigm that we call physicalist. Some people call materialist paradigm, but I would just use the word physicalist paradigm that assumes that the mind is a product or a byproduct of the brain. So that means that everything that we experience, everything that we perceive, everything that we feel is generated by our brains. And the reality, and the physicalist paradigm also assumes that our reality is primarily physical and space and time are fundamental. So these are the assumptions
14:05 Speaker 00 of the physicalist paradigm. At the Division of Perceptual Study, we study phenomena that defy that physicalist paradigm.
14:14 Speaker 00 So we are studying phenomena that some people call anomalies. We tend to call them extraordinary because they cannot be easily explained or they cannot be explained at all by the assumption that the mind is created by the brain. And also the assumption that space and time is fundamental cannot be applied to the type of phenomena that we are studying. And the type of phenomena I'm talking about is like children that have memories of past lives, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, which is my main research. Some people, they have abilities such as precognition. They have communication with deceased, loved people.
14:59 Speaker 00 So all of these type of phenomena, they cannot be explained by the physicalist paradigm, which then leads us to, well, the mind is not a product of the brain. So we have to assume another paradigm. We have to come up with new ideas. And then a new idea, which is against the physicalist paradigm, is that the mind is not a by-product of the brain. The mind is not generated by the brain. So one of the theories that tries to replace the physicalism is assumes that the brain would be like a filter. According to this hypothesis, the brain-filter hypothesis, consciousness is everywhere. And the brain would be like a filter in the sense if you compare to a TV or a radio device.
15:44 Speaker 00 So the radio waves, they are there everywhere. We don't see them. And they don't need the radio device to exist. What the radio device does is to capture those waves and translate them in a way that we can understand. So that's an analogy for the mind-brain relationship, that the brain being a filter, meaning it's capturing the consciousness that is everywhere and is fundamental. And our brains are filter that construct cognitively space and time to make sense of our experiences.
16:24 Jonathan Fields? How does that, I mean, it's such a fascinating theory. It feels like it mirrors to a certain extent also the more we've heard in spiritual domains or conversations, this notion of the Akashic or the Akashic field, which is this unified field of consciousness that, and what you're saying is the brain essentially, it sort of like pulls down and filters these things into something that feels concrete, that takes shape and form. Does that also play into what we would, we would understand our sense of identity is?
16:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, I would say so. Not always sense of identity, but you know, our, ourselves in general. So our personalities, our identities, our memories, our perceptions, our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, everything is what makes us us. I don't think these things are generated by the brain, you know? I think these are fundamental aspects of ourselves, of our consciousness.
17:16 Jonathan Fields? So when you decide to go deeper into this idea, and as you said, a lot of your work is now focused on this thing described as outer body experiences or out of body experiences. I guess the first thing is when we use the phrase out of body experience, what are we actually talking about here?
17:33 Speaker 00 It's a good question. I always like to start with definitions. Out of body experiences is, is a phenomenon that the definition varies according to different researchers. So there are some mainstream researchers that assume the neuroscientific model, very materialist, very physicalist. And according to these researchers, they say that out of body experiences are generated by either alteration or disruption of some brain regions, especially the temporal parietal junction, which is a region localized here at the back of our brains, which is responsible for making sense of space and time and our body perception.
18:17 Speaker 00 So if there is any alteration in that brain region or other regions of the brain, then that's going to lead to an out of body experience. Other researchers, they also add on this model and they say there are some psychological features, such as Higher prone to absorption or fantasy prones that people that have these psychological features, they are more prone to have out of body experiences. So this is one model. This is one way of seeing and understanding out of body experiences. There are other researchers that they assume that an out of body experience is the literal separation
18:57 Speaker 00 between consciousness, what they call a soul or a spirit or the mind. So it's the separation of this consciousness from the physical body. So that would be what this out, the, the, the word out of body means is like a literal separation. The way that I understand this phenomenon, an out of body experience is the subjective feeling that someone has during a period of time, during a window, that they exist without being in their physical bodies.
19:37 Speaker 00 So during that time, they have the awareness that I exist, I'm still here, but I'm not in my physical body anymore. And it's, when I say it's a subjective feeling, I like to emphasize that because I don't think that to, an experience to be called an out of body experience, it needs to have a evidence. For example, like, oh, you need to bring information from somewhere to actually prove that you were out of your body. So if you just think that this is a subjective feeling, as long as the person had the feeling that they existed without being their physical bodies, you kind of don't need that proof or that evidence anymore.
20:22 Speaker 00 You just take on someone's word and saying, yeah, I had that feeling when I was sleeping, I was having a nap. And then suddenly I woke up and I was flying or I was floating above my body, above my physical body. And I, I could see what, what was happening in my room. I could see my partner laying down. Or, you know, I floated away to. Another room to my living room and maybe I saw my family there. Or maybe sometimes the person just had the this out of body experience and went to different dimensions and different realms, you know, when they didn't specifically see their physical bodies or anything objective in this reality, but they still had the feeling of
21:06 Speaker 00 existing and not being in their physical bodies. So this type of experience is very phenomenologically rich. People can experience different things while they have the experience of being out of their bodies. But to me, what really matters is the feeling that they exist without being in the physical body.
21:28 Jonathan Fields? We can't really even go there without establishing what we were just talking about before, which is that if you believe that the mind and the brain are the same thing, then there's no real way for this to happen, right? Because you can't, if the mind only exists in the context of the brain, then it can't leave the body. You can't have an out of body experience. But if you believe that exists as consciousness exists as something separate from your physical being, then it opens the door to say, okay, so maybe it's possible then for this consciousness to leave the body, to leave the physical state, to leave the brain for a moment in time or however long it may be. And that's where we get all these different reports of people in, you know, an operating room, looking down upon themselves and watching the surgery happening while they're unconscious,
22:13 Jonathan Fields? or like you just described, you know, like floating up above, you know, when you're napping. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
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25:01 Jonathan Fields? I guess one of the big questions for me is there are going to be people listening to this and some are like, yeah, like finally, somebody's talking about this in a real way, in a scientific way, invalidating my ideas. And other people are going to listen to this or watch this and roll their eyes and say, really? We're going there? We're talking about this? How do you even begin to have a conversation with people on that level? Or do you just not? Do you just say, look, this is an experience that millions of people have reported that has existed for generations over time and we're simply studying what's really going on? But like, the phenomenon is real?
25:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. When you said, oh, there is no way someone could be having an out of body experience if there is no separation. I disagree. I think that even if you have a physicalist mindset and you don't believe there is such a separation, someone can still experience an out of body. Because as I said, that's the subjective experience that you were out. Even if you don't believe that you were truly out, if you don't believe there is a separation, you can still experience it. The difference is that the cause, the way you're going to interpret your experience is going to be different. You're just going to think it's my brain hallucinating. And then in this sense, out of body experiences, they don't inform more than, let's say, dreams. You know, people still dream during the night
26:16 Speaker 00 and they just assume that dreams are generated by the brain. So an out of body experience is again, generated by the brain. So that mindset does not prevent anyone from having. They're just going to give it like different interpretations for it. And then that leads to your next question. So how do we study? The way we approach out of body experiences is understanding the subjective experiences that people are having. Obviously, I am interested in the ontology of the experience, like is actually, is there actually a separation between the mind and the brain? But not only that, I think there are many ways we can
26:55 Speaker 00 study out of body experiences without going into the ontological problem. So one of the ways we can study out of body experiences is understanding if there is a underlying psychopath. Pathology behind the phenomenon. And what we can do, for example, is to compare people that have had out of body experiences with people that have never had out of body experiences in terms of comorbidities such as depression, if they've been diagnosed before with any type of psychiatric illnesses, if they are taking medication, how socially adjusted they are, if they've had any childhood trauma.
27:40 Speaker 00 So these are ways we can understand if there is any underlying psychopathology behind these experiences. Another way to explore them is to understand what are the psychological effects that out of body experiences have on people. So for example, we know that anecdotally, the people that have out of body experiences, they have this psychological transformation. These experiences, they are very powerful on people. And one of the main effects of having them is to have diminished fear of death and dying. And that happens because during an out of body experience, the person had the experience,
28:23 Speaker 00 had the subjective experience of existing without being the physical body. So when they come back to their bodies, they have the belief that they are gonna survive again when their bodies die. So that is a huge transformation that people have after experiencing being out of their bodies. Another one is just this increased prosocial behavior. So increased empathy, increased altruism is something else that we already perceive that happens after people having an out of body experience. And that is mainly because one of the perceptions that people have during these experiences
29:07 Speaker 00 is that we are all interconnected at a deeper level. So this is one of a very profound experience that leads people
29:18 Speaker 00 To believe that we are fundamentally connected at a deeper level. So when they come back to their bodies, they're like, okay, so if I hurt my peer, that means I'm also gonna be hurting myself. Or if I hurt someone else, it means I'm gonna be hurting the entire system because we are all connected. So this is another approach that I'm also taking. What I'm gonna do is to deliver questionnaires, trying to understand how out of body experiences change. People in terms of fear of death and dying, in terms of materialistic values, ego size, psychological well-being, empathy, so all of these different psychological aspects.
30:02 Speaker 00 Another way that we can understand and approach the study of out of body experiences is to understand what's happening in the brain during these experiences. And we are also doing this here at DOBS. For that, we have to overcome a limitation that is the spontaneous nature of these experiences. So like, it's a huge limitation and challenge we need to overcome. Since they're spontaneous, how are we gonna understand? We cannot put the person in an MRI or EEG because we don't know and they're gonna happen. So what we've been doing is working with people that can induce these experiences at will. And we ask them to induce these experiences in a very controlled manner
30:46 Speaker 00 that we can record EEG signal when these people are inducing these experiences. And we are also taking that approach. And then, obviously, if we want to understand the ontological nature of out of body experiences, is this like a byproduct of the brain? Or is there actually anything that, is there any aspect of consciousness that is non-local? Is there any perception that transcends space and time? Obviously, an easy way to do it is to put a target in another room and ask the person to go there and see the target. We are also doing that type of experiment here. And I think this is being what many researchers have tried to do. You know, they ask the
31:28 Speaker 00 Person, okay, induce your out of body here either by hypnosis or self-induced or using different types of auditory stimulation. And they put a target in another room. And if the person is able to bring any perceptions or any information that is distant from the physical body, that would be evidence that something is beyond the brain. There is another actually way of understanding this separation, which would be in the form of apparitions. So for example, many people that had out of body experiences, they say that they were seen by third people or or this third people saw, oh, yeah, I saw you
32:11 Speaker 00 visiting my house, you know, or visiting my room during the middle of the night. And then that person says, yes, I was having an out of body experience. So that would be another type of evidence or experimental approach to understand the ontological nature of out of body experiences. So these are all different ways we can understand the phenomenon. And and you see that not all of them assume that consciousness is actually separated from the body. It's just one way of studying it.
32:40 Jonathan Fields? Right, so I have so many questions now.
32:44 Jonathan Fields? Let me let me see if I can remember some of these. You started out by saying, okay, so we look at the psychopathological side of it. Like, is there some other, is there depression, is there trauma, is there, are these these other identifiable things? Do you see, is there research that that can correlate the presence of out of body experiences with any particular other psychopathology?
33:06 Speaker 00 There has been some research into that. And some researchers do say that OB years, so people that experience out of body experiences, they have higher dissatisfaction with their physical bodies or something they call somatoform dissociation. They also say that people that tend to have out of body experiences, they have more absorption and fantasy proness is not necessarily a psychopathology. They're just psychological. But they have been associated and correlated with out of body experiences. In terms of more psychopathological aspect,
33:47 Speaker 00 there has been some studies showing that some out of harm dissociation could be associated with out of body experiences. But this is not what I see in my research, you know, and I've been talking to many people and I am currently conducting the very similar type of research in terms of understanding if there is any childhood trauma or any type of social unadjustment or any indication of psychopathology. And I don't see that and I I just gather data for over six hundred people. So, you know, there has been some studies, but I think they're still very controversial and I don't think it's like a fixed idea. Yes, this is related to any psychopathology.
34:30 Jonathan Fields? Which brings me to one of the other questions, which is, so you described how some people, I guess, seem to have the ability to almost induce these out of body experiences at will. Whereas other people, it's a spontaneous thing, it's not planned, it just happens and they probably have no idea how or why it happened or how to reproduce the phenomenon. Which as a researcher would be incredibly complex to try and figure out like, how did I study this? Is there a way that you are able to produce these out of body experiences in people sort of on demand in a lab through brain stimulation, through any other sort of manipulation where like fairly regularly you can actually just take anyone off the street,
35:14 Jonathan Fields? bring them into the lab and say, okay, we have a pretty high probability of being able to allow you to experiences?
35:21 Speaker 00 People have tried to and some researchers say that they developed a virtual reality experimental design or if they stimulate some parts of the brain, they will induce out of body experiences in people. But I personally don't see the way. I think that the type of experiences these researchers are generating, they are very different from a real out of body experience. Which is the feeling of existence, the the the subjective feeling of detachment from the physical body. And those experiments like virtual reality induced or brain stimulation induced,
36:01 Speaker 00 I'm gonna say quote unquote out of body, they are more like alterations in your bodily perception. So what people will feel, for example, that their legs are shrinking or their whole body is increasing, or sometimes they will see only, they will even see their physical bodies from outside, but it's only half of the body. So these experiences, they don't feel real, they feel very illusionary. And it's completely different from an out of body experience that it feels very real. Sometimes it feels more real than reality itself. And people don't lose the sense of agency.
36:43 Speaker 00 They are still themselves, they still have their personalities, they still have their thoughts, their emotions. They are just not in their physical body anymore. And when they see their physical body, there is no change. It's completely how they actually are. So there is no distortion in the in the physical body. It's just the feeling that I'm not there anymore. So I think these artificially induced out of body experiences is very different from the type of experience that I am studying here at Dobbs. But that is not to say that someone can someone cannot be trained to have. So I just think it's it's a little harder.
37:26 Speaker 00 It's not like just come to the lab and let's do a virtual reality or a brain stimulation and you're gonna have one. There are people that can induce such experiences. And they can be induced through hypnosis, as I said. They can be induced with psychedelic compounds. They can be induced only with meditation and visualization techniques. But these are a little harder, you know, usually people take many years to learn how to have one. I do think and I have seen people that can have these experiences in a controlled manner in the lab because we've done so. But we are not using any type of virtual reality or brain stimulation to induce these experiences. We rely on the person's own techniques to induce them.
38:13 Jonathan Fields? Got it. It's just kind of wild to think about how complex this actually is. And like, what is, you know, when somebody is having this out of body experience, that's entirely subjective. Like, how do you on the outside understand, you're like, who's having the real one? Who's having like the one that's induced through some sort of external mechanism that's kind of real but not really? And then when you're trying to study and figure out what's really happening here, and you're like, and, and how, how does this affect people? Just trying to make a distinction between sort of, quote, "a real out of body experience" and something that wouldn't really qualify is gotta be, and that's really thorny, just from like a, like a running a science experiment standpoint.
38:56 Speaker 00 I just want to clarify a little bit. When you say like a real out of body experience, to me, all of them are real as long as the person feels disembodied. People come to me and describe their experiences and they say, "This is what I felt." And then people will ask, "Did I have an out of body experience?" And then I ask back, "Did you feel that at that moment you existed without being a physical body?" And then if the person says yes, and then I said, "So I think you had an out of body experience, and that is real. The experience itself is real." It's like a dream. Are dreams real? Well, the experience of dreaming is real. So that's a little different. If the person actually went outside,
39:40 Speaker 00 and then again, we go back into the ontological question, like, what is the nature of the experience? We cannot answer to that question with the subjective feelings that the person had, but all of them are real.
39:55 Jonathan Fields? Got it. You mentioned also this sort of an experimental design where you would have somebody potentially induce this state in a lab, have in another room, a target, where you know there was something that was identifiable that the person had not been exposed to, they couldn't have known, and then ask them, you know, to effectively, when they're out of body, travel there, tell you what's there and come back. And then when they return to their body, tell you, like, what was it? Are these experiments being done? Have you seen any data around outcomes around this?
40:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, they have been done and I did those experiments just a few months ago. Those type of experiments testing the, what we call the radicality of an out of body experience, so like bringing of the radical information that can be tested. They've been done mostly decades ago, I would say in the seventies, in the sixties and the seventies and the eighties. That's when parapsychologists, they conducted the bulk of the research testing the radicality. And then early two thousands, when we saw like neuroimaging techniques coming and brain stimulation, the neuroscientific model of neuro, uh, of an out of body experience like took over.
41:08 Speaker 00 And people were just trying to understand, the focus changed into trying to understand what's happening in the brain and explaining an out of body experience through the lenses of neuroscience and it's just an alteration in the brain. Nowadays, there is like very few researchers doing that type of research into, um, testing the ver- radicality of out of body experiences. We do test our participants because again, I am also interested in understanding the ontological nature of these experiences. The first time we tested was a few months ago in July, when I went to Brazil to work with participants that can induce these experiences at will.
41:50 Speaker 00 And we did experiments with twenty one participants that claimed to induce them at will with a reasonable success rate. And we brought sixty four channel portable EEG to understand, so record, um, brain activity during these experiences. And we also placed a target in another room. So for the target, we pre-selected a hundred objects. They were in a white background and objects like just a day to day objects. I would say like a house or a flower, a pencil, a pair of shoes, a computer. So we pre-selected a pool of a hundred objects and then during the experiment.
42:36 Speaker 00 The computer randomly chose one of the objects and displayed in the on the monitor. And then we, the researchers, we did not have access, so we were completely blind to what object, what target was being displayed. We just pressed a button, the script generated, and but we were not looking at the computer when this happened. And we had a camera recording the door, so if anyone went to the room, we have everything recorded. And none of the, as I said, none of the researchers known what the target was. And then when the experiments were finished, we would just press ask and then it would shut down whatever was being displayed. So we were completely blind to the experiments.
43:21 Speaker 00 We were trying to avoid sensory leakage or any type of like body language reading or anything like that from the participants. We are just now starting to analyze the data, so unfortunately, right now, I don't have anything to tell you on how the participants went, the how, if they were able to perceive. But six out of the 21 participants were able to come with some type of perception. And the perceptions would range from colors, like some people just saw colors and shapes and other people would say, I think it's a flower, you know, it's something related to a flower. And others would come with perceptions more like saying,
44:05 Speaker 00 I was at the beach and there was something related to the beach here. So the type of perception changed a lot and we had six participants coming with some type of perception from our experiments.
44:16 Jonathan Fields? God, I mean, fascinating. So it's a sort of a little bit of a cliffhanger then. Wait and see what the what the data analysis shows us. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Fairlight Project is sponsored by Vindit. So here's a question that I have been sitting with. How many things in your closet were bought for, let's say, a version of you who never quite showed up? Maybe it's the tailored jacket for the dinners you were gonna go to, or someday pieces with the tag still on them. They're lovely clothes. They're just not yours anymore. That's where Vindit comes in. So Vindit is a secondhand marketplace app where everyday people sell the clothes that they're not wearing to people who actually will. Listening on Vindit is quick and simple.
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47:30 Jonathan Fields? As you're describing the out of body experience also, and this is something that you've spoken to or written about as well, the notion of ego dissolution, I think, comes to mind as well. And we hear this, I think a lot of people have heard this phrase, psychedelics have become a big part of the conversation, the zeitgeist. There's research going on in the US now around it. And one of the common experiences that people report has been, what I've heard more clinically described as ego dissolution. Where does that fit in, if at all, in the context of the conversation around out of body experiences?
48:06 Speaker 00 Well, this is another thing that I'm trying to understand, how the concept of ego dissolution relates to out of body experience. I recently just wrote a manuscript proposing that out of body experiences lead to increased empathy and pro-social behavior through ego dissolution, which, as you said, is a well-known phenomenon in psychedelic research. What is interesting- Thing is that many psychedelic compounds do lead to an out of body experience, especially 5-MO DMT is the one that is highly known to induce OBs.
48:44 Speaker 00 So what I proposed is that an out of body experience leads to the experience of ego dissolution, where is no ego anymore, there is experience of ego death. And once you experience the ego death, you understand that there are no walls anymore, like the invisible walls that separate us from each other, from the universe and from all beings. And then you understand that we are all connected at a deeper level. And that leads to increased empathy, empathy and pro-social behavior. The concept itself of ego dissolution,
49:27 Speaker 00 outside the context of psychedelic research, is not very well explored and understood. What I did so far is just borrow this concept from psychedelics and brought to out of body experiences. But I don't think that all of the out of body experiences lead to the ego dissolution phenomena. I think that some of them can be, you know, very ordinary in the sense that people just quickly have this experience. They get scared and they quickly go back to their bodies without integrating, without requiring a cognitive accommodation, without reframing their beliefs, without actually experience this ego dissolution.
50:11 Speaker 00 So I think there is a very strong relationship between out of body and ego dissolution, but I don't think there is like a one-to-one relationship.
50:20 Jonathan Fields? Hmm. So then it would make, tell me if this makes sense then, that? If somebody were to have an OBE, an out of body experience, and during that experience, they also had this this experience of ego dissolution, of their ego effectively dissolving and a loss of perception of barriers between them and other people, other beings, that when they come back from that experience, that would that then the person who would be much more likely to then be the person who experienced like a deepening of empathy, prosocial behavior versus somebody who had an out of body experience without ego dissolution?
50:58 Speaker 00 Yes, the in terms of increased understanding of interconnectedness and this feeling of oneness, I think the experience of ego dissolution plays an important role. But there are other effects of out of body experience, like the belief of survival beyond your bodily death. I don't think that necessarily is related to the ego dissolution. You know, I think that if the person sees and experiences existence without being a physical body, even without having this ego dissolution experience, that leads to the belief in an afterlife.
51:39 Jonathan Fields? No, that makes a lot of sense. So do you feel like somebody could also have an out of body experience, come back from it, and then no sense of ego dissolution at all? You know, like they're still up there and they're like, oh, this is me floating above me. I don't have any sense of like anything there being dissolved or that they could come back and then also experience that sense of empathy that you were talking about, that sense of oneness?
52:04 Speaker 00 That's a good question.
52:07 Speaker 00 I think so, and I think the the change in empathy, this is what I've been talking to many people that come to me and say, oh, my empathy hasn't changed after my my OBE. And I think one factor here is it depends on the baseline levels, you know, like some people are already very empathic and some people already have this high feeling of interconnectedness. So I don't think an out of body experience is going to change much. Depending on the beliefs and the personality of the person. So I think that if the person did not have that experience before in terms of, I'm just a physical individual and I have no connection with my peers and I have no connection to the universe or nature.
52:52 Speaker 00 It could definitely change after an out of body experience. But again, I think it depends also a lot on the baseline levels and the personality of the person.
53:02 Jonathan Fields? Right. You use the word integration also, and that's another word that I've heard used in the context of psychedelic research. Often described as, you know, like, this is what happens after you come back. You know, that you've just had this experience that kind of shattered your understanding of what is and what isn't. Maybe had that ego dissolution experience and an out of body experience, which often is a part of that. But if you just walk out of, you know, the therapist's office or the clinic or wherever you're doing it, or, you know, like other contexts that some people will do. And you just never do anything with that. That would be a very different experience than somebody who comes back and then actually goes through some sort of thoughtful process of integration. Talk to me about this.
53:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think the process of integration is very important. As you said, also in psychedelic research, more and more we see that the integration of the experience is part of the entire process. And in clinical trials, you know, it's very important how the person sees and how the person integrates everything that they experienced. And it's not different during an out of body experience. And what we see is that people that don't talk about their experiences. The main reason why they don't talk about their experiences is because they don't, they don't want to be ridiculed. They don't want to be dismissed away and because the experience feels very real. They don't want anyone else saying this is just a dream or you just imagined this is a hallucination.
54:30 Speaker 00 So what people do is generally they fear the stigma and they shut down. And I would say the most people never shared they ever had an out of body experience. But inside. A lot changed. People just don't wanna share because they are scared of being ridiculed. But if you actually talk to someone and understand what changed, they're gonna say a lot changed. You know, like I no longer fear death, or I'm more empathic, or I understand things better. I had many existential insights. It's also, this is another effect, people have existential insights during their experiences.
55:10 Speaker 00 I think the role of integration is especially important depending on what your belief was before the experience. If you are a person that is like a physicalist and you don't believe you could ever exist without being in your physical body, but then you experience it, it's gonna be a shock. It's gonna be an ontological shock and like what do you do out of it? And again, because the experience feels so real, it's really hard for people to integrate and it requires a lot of what we call cognitive accommodation. But if the person has already a belief that consciousness is not a product of my brain,
55:53 Speaker 00 and then they have these experiences, I would say they probably need less integration. They need less cognitive accommodation because what they experienced was, you know, like in accordance to what they believed before.
56:08 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. It's sort of like, you know, they already had a model of themselves, the world, consciousness, that this matched up with, so it's not so jarring. Whereas if somebody was completely opposite and then this kind of blows apart the model of their existence, I would imagine there's a lot more processing would have to happen for them to figure out like, what do I do with it? Because it's almost like it blows up the, a really important belief system and then they've got to reassemble a new belief system in a way that allows them to be okay.
56:38 Speaker 00 And it's very hard to come up with a new belief system. As I said, it requires a lot of cognitive accommodation. It's not something that we do overnight. I've been through this process twice of changing my belief system. And it took me many years to to come with a new one. So it's it's really hard. Some people really don't wanna talk about it, or it's just easier for them to dismiss what they experience, because it's just too hard to come. And you know, just disregard whatever you believed before. It takes a lot of courage and it takes a lot of effort to to come with a new paradigm.
57:16 Jonathan Fields? Which I think gets gets down to also, if you look at the research that you're doing and gaining a better understanding of what out of body experiences are and aren't, how they affect us, how they can sometimes affect us in really powerful ways. I mean, what's your sense for what the the the practical application this is, both on an individual and a societal level? I know that's kind of a big question.
57:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think there is a huge impact. At the individual level, you know, once you understand or once you have the feeling that we are all interconnected at a deeper level, you stop acting so selfishly, you know, because you are able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. And you understand that hurting others means hurting yourself and hurting the larger consciousness system, let's put it this way. Not only that, but how how we live our lives. Everything is so intertwined in the materialist view and the physicalist view, this new paradigm.
58:21 Speaker 00 It leads so much into how people live their lives in terms of buying and giving so much importance to money and pursuing and pursuing and pursuing physical things instead of just looking inside and trying to learn and experience new things and growing from a spiritual perspective. But also the way that people treat each other. I would say that these experiences They they people, they come back transformed, uh, not only from an out of body, but a near death experience. They're, you know, they're very impactful experiences that change people completely. They want to live fuller lives. The way they treat others is completely different.
59:06 Speaker 00 Many of them give up on previous jobs because they wanna do something that brings meaningful to their lives. It changes how they treat their family. They wanna spend more time with their families. They wanna spend more time doing things that are meaningful to them. Sometimes they even change their diet. They stop, you know, eating animals because they they see that animals are suffering. And uh, so there are many different ways that this changes people. And by changing individuals, you change the society. Because I would say that the way we're living our lives today, so much focused on money
59:45 Speaker 00 and capitalism and the way we elect our whoever is in representing us in the government. Everything has to do with the paradigm that each one has inside, the way we live our lives and what we believe of what happens in terms of consciousness and the brain.
1:00:05 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating because the implications are potentially huge. Let's dream a little bit, zoom the lens out. If there was a way to pretty consistently allow almost anybody to induce an out of body experience in in a safe way, in a repeatable way. Do you ever envision or or dream of a world where every person could experience this? It's almost like a doctor or psychiatrist would write a script for an OBE, for an out of body experience. It's like you're going through certain things or, you know, like you're very self-centered or like narcissism or whatever it may be. Or maybe you're doing okay, but you're just sort of, you know, like you're looking at at the way that you're living your life and kind of feeling like there's something more.
1:00:51 Jonathan Fields? Do you envision a future where there's some way to systematically and safely allow anybody who would like to experience this to induce it? And that by allowing that, the net effect just on them and also just at large could be potentially transformative.
1:01:08 Speaker 00 Well, I do envision that. And there are, there are some people using virtual reality forms of disembodiment to, you know, see if it changes, like a decreased fear of death. People are using that in hospices or in research to make people feel more comfortable with death. I do think a way of changing society would be asking everyone to have out of body experiences or near death experiences, so then they could experience all these transformative effects. But at the same time, the only reason we would require someone to have an experience to change this worldview is because someone was raised in this worldview in the first place.
1:01:53 Speaker 00 So another way of changing this is, why are we teaching kids the physicalist paradigm? Why are we teaching kids? I mean, I do understand that this is the prevailing paradigm, but assuming that a personal experience is what requires someone to change is because originally they had their mindsets into that paradigm. There is some research here, my, my colleague Bruce Grayson and Marietta Pelivanova, they're doing research in near death experiences and they were able to show that only by reading near death experiences, that changes people too. You don't necessarily need to have had one.
1:02:35 Speaker 00 So if you read and if you listen to people that have had these experiences and if, if you learn from their teachings, that also affect others. So that's very powerful. But my point is, why does it take that personal one, like individual changes once? Rather, we could just change what we are teaching to kids and teaching them that there is this interconnection, you know, that we could teach empathy or we could teach other forms of prosocial behavior and without necessarily having one of these experiences. I never had an out of body experience myself. It doesn't mean that.
1:03:18 Speaker 00 I don't think I needed to have one and I and I see many of my my friends and people close to me that never had any of these extraordinary experiences and yet they are able to have this different road view and understand that it's important to spiritually and grow, you know, that we are more than this, just this physical reality. It took me many years to accept this road set and this mindset. It was it was through a lot of reading and reading about the evidence, but I really see that changing in the future where we change the paradigm and we teach kids how to be different. So then they don't need to have the experiences to be better people.
1:04:03 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, it's almost like just having convincing knowledge or witnessing these experiences or having them explained in a way that actually just kind of makes sense could be enough to really seed the shifts that we're talking about. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
1:04:26 Speaker 00 To live a good life, um, I would say is to embrace your experiences, um, embrace your anomalous experiences, embrace your extraordinary experiences. Most of people have had any something and they have a huge potential to teach people that we are more than just our physical bodies. And by understanding that we are more than our physical bodies, we understand that there is nothing to be scared and death is only a passage, death is only a going home.
1:05:08 Speaker 00 And if we are not scared of death and dying anymore, we are not scared of living.
1:05:16 Jonathan Fields? Hmm, thank you.
1:05:19 Jonathan Fields? Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Ani Yousum on the science of spirituality. If I can link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting, or inspiring, or valuable, and chances are you did, since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor, and share it? Maybe on social, or by text,
1:06:04 Jonathan Fields? or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using, and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better, so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations, and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
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